Uber drivers can help to explain the pay gap

It simply seems to be that with free choice, women Uber drivers in Chicago, on average, act differently from their male counterpartsCredit:
Seth Wenig/AP

The gender pay gap is a tricky concept for proponents of “evidence-based policy”. The Government has introduced a legal requirement for businesses with more than 250 employees to publish average gender pay statistics. The rationale is for “transparency”, apparently, though it does not take Nostradamus to forecast how these will be used in public debate. The demands for action will follow.

Yet what is rarely mentioned is that there is a large amount of empirical literature in economics that explains why apparent headline pay gaps exist. Controlling for occupation types, time in the labour force, education levels, and market rewards for unpleasant or unpopular work and more, the remaining “gap”...